Description

In this genre-bending apocalyptic novel Josefine Klougart fuses myriad literary styles to breathtaking effect in poetic meditations on life and death interspersed with haunting imagery. Her experimental novel asks readers to reconsider death, asserting sorrow and loss as beautiful and necessary aspects of living.

Hailed as “the Virginia Woolf of Scandinavia,” Klougart mixes prose, lyric essay, drama, poetry, and images to breathtaking effect in her writing, and Of Darkness, coming on the heels of Open Letter’s release of Klougart’s English-language debut One of Us is Sleeping, marks the arrival of a wholly new literary talent and original voice in world literature.

Additional information

Format

Paperback, eBook

Excerpt

All that the eyes see, upon which a gaze falls.
A bag someone places on the floor is: a bag someone places on the floor. All things remain as things, and in that way they are here. The room is not disrupted, the chronology is not disrupted—none of its constituent parts have ever been together in that way. The way I have always been she, and you have always been he. There isn’t necessarily any problem in that. A movement in and out of our bodies, a recollection returned, wandering back and forth between us. Or an anger no one understands. A common reservoir, the increasingly threadlike capillaries of the veins; something proceeding through time, then turning back.
All sounds are quite as distinct. All voices can be heard, and as such none enjoys priority.
A whisper is as clear as a shout. Something serves to amplify the weaker sounds and lengthen the louder ones so that we may hear them. The eyes decide for themselves what they want to observe.
That may be a comfort.
The ceiling, like the spine of a crouching animal. The duality of movement: inwards and outwards; down to the floor, then up. A whisper, and the space expands. Or: a whisper, and the space is compressed.
Not focusing on anything allows things to emerge more clearly. The ways in which they connect—with the eyes that see, and the bodies that listen. The fact of the eye requiring distance in order for an image to come together again in a new way.
Plains and skin. Coasts, cuticles.
Such leaps, on all imaginable scales.
Sound and image work on their own, independently. A thing such as distance. What can distances be measured against. A sky. A sail we have stretched out between walls. The arching vaults of cathedrals.
And the same goes for time, the past mingling with what is; the salient past that is here, and all that is yet to come: here.
The will of the image, and the will of sound. A liberation of the different planes.
For instance:
The image of a beach, a broad belt of sand in panorama. There are no people in sight, we see only beach, sea, sky. Presently we hear two voices, a man and a woman talking. We hear them clearly, their voices rise with ease above the clamour of the waves.
Next, they enter the frame, and the image splits into two images superimposed: the beach before and the beach now; before him and after him, before her and after her; everything that happened here will happen here—happens here. Death is perhaps merely a displacement, the same as silence. A moment’s imprudence and then again: here.

Reviews

“She has an unusual ability to create phrases, images and a language that you long to stay in and remember forever.” — Dagens Nyheter

Related products

About Us

Deep Vellum Publishing is a not-for-profit literary publisher that seeks to enhance the open exchange of ideas among cultures and to connect the world’s greatest untranslated contemporary writers of literature and creative nonfiction with English-language readers for the first time through original translations, while facilitating educational opportunities for students of translation in the Dallas community, and promoting a more vibrant literary community in north Texas and beyond.